Article · 12 min read

What is a good activation rate

Lenny Rachitsky and Yuriy Timen · Lenny's Newsletter Free Beginner

Benchmarks from 500 plus products: 34 percent average, 36 percent for SaaS. If you have ever wondered whether your number is bad or normal, this is the answer, and it is free.

  • Across 500+ products the average activation rate is 34 percent, the median 25 percent.
  • For SaaS specifically the average is 36 percent and the median 30 percent.
  • 60th percentile counts as a good activation rate, 80th percentile as great.
  • A real activation metric shows at least 2x better retention for users who hit it.
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It answers 9 questions

  1. Everyone says find your aha moment. What is it actually, and how do I find ours?
  2. Our activation rate is 18 percent. Is that terrible, or is that just what it is?
  3. I just joined a PLG company as my first GTM job. What do I actually do all day if the product sells itself?
  4. Our self-serve funnel converts at about 2 percent from signup to paid. Where do I even start looking?
  5. How do I pick one activation metric when the product supports five very different use cases?
  6. I have a backlog of 30 activation ideas and no way to rank them. How do I decide what to build?
  7. How do I set an activation target the whole company will actually rally behind?
  8. What should I actually report to the board for a PLG business, given pipeline coverage means nothing here?
  9. What separates a top-quartile self-serve funnel from an average one, stage by stage?

Read with it

  1. Poyar replaces the sales funnel with a five stage new user journey (discover, start, activate, convert, scale) and attaches... Growth Unhinged Newsletter · 10 min read Your guide to PLG benchmarks Kyle Poyar
  2. A short, specific list of what to instrument on a self-serve funnel, including time to activation and time to convert, which... Amplitude Article · 12 min read Top 10 Metrics to Measure Freemium and Free Trial Performance Carmen DeCouto
  3. Goes past the single aha metric to a three stage model (setup, aha, habit) with Apollo.io and Appcues case studies, plus the... Product Growth Article · 25 min read How to Measure Onboarding: Advanced Topics in Activation Metrics Aakash Gupta and Ramli John
  4. A three step method (brainstorm milestones, regress against retention, then experiment to prove causation) with worked examples... Lenny's Newsletter Article · 15 min read How to determine your activation metric Lenny Rachitsky
  5. It defines time to value precisely enough to instrument: a start event, a value event, and the gap between them. The insistence... Amplitude Article · 12 min read What Is TTV: A Complete Guide to Time to Value Amplitude
  6. Hila Qu built PLG at GitLab and scaled Acorns, and this is the rare free piece that maps the sales-led funnel against the... Lenny's Newsletter Article · 20 min read Five steps to starting your product-led growth motion Hila Qu
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